An Italian in the Indian jungle(re)locating Emilio Servadio in the history of psychoanalysis and India.

Abstract

The largely unread India-period writings of Emilio Servadio (1904-1995), an Italian psychoanalyst, include courses on psychoanalysis, short stories, essays on art, and the experience of internment, and several India-themed papers that pushed at the boundaries of early psychoanalysis' intellectual territory. This essay, based on his archive, is the first reading of his India period to be written, and it is divided into three parts. Part I tells the story of Servadio in India based on the archived correspondence between Servadio and Girindrasekhar Bose, the first president of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society (IPS). Part II uses psychoanalytic theorizing on colonialism from Klein (1937), Mannoni (1950) and Eng (2016) to consider whether the affective stakes of studying psychoanalysis in India during the colonial period might relate to Servadio's historical neglect. This section also describes my subject position with respect to this research. Part III reproduces a text from an essay by Servadio about which Bose was enthusiastic: "Notes on oral and phallic elements in a single hour". The essay ?cuál closes by suggesting that Servadio's case presentation of his Indian patient may have given further energy to Bose's well-documented argument with Freud on the subject of cultural factors in the castration complex. Re-forging the missing link between Servadio and India, I conclude, may give a fuller picture of the history of psychoanalysis and India.